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While hopes are high for converting the London Hydro office and works yard into a chi-chi riverfront collection of restaurants, shops and condos, the site has a long legacy of contamination and the river could run through it.

City hall is about to sign a deal with Toronto-based Kilmer Brownfield to assess and clean up the 5.6-hectare site at 111 Horton St., ready it for redevelopment, then share proceeds of the property’s increased value.

Part of the downtown vision to reconnect the core to the Thames River, the venture has caught the imagination of people like Peter Whatmore, commercial realtor with CBRE Ltd.

“If anybody can do it, they can do it,” he said Thursday of Kilmer Brownfield. “It’s one of the best firms in the country.”

“I think it’s a heck of a site, a real gateway to the core, a very exciting, spectacular site.”

But the site’s history, nature and extent of its pollution may test Kilmer’s abilities.

Historian Joe O’Neil said the site was once home to a coal-fired power plant and he found maps from 1922 showing it had a water reservoir, an electrical substation and a garage where electrical and battery repairs were once done.

“After it has been burned, coal leaves all sorts of heavy metals,” he said, in addition to the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) associated with electrical transformers. PCBs have been tied to cancer.

“The area was heavily industrial, heavily polluted,” he said of the south branch of the Thames at that location and to the east.

Immediately to the west is the site of a former coal-gasification plant, where the removal of coal tar, also associated with cancer, was estimated to cost about $30 million a decade ago. The tar is contained, capped and removed from runoff water.

Any work on that property would attract the environmental police and significant spending.

Sandy Levin, an environmentalist and former city councillor, recalls the contamination of the adjacent site and wonders if it may have migrated.

“Only when you start digging holes do you find out what’s underneath,” he said. “You have a long history of industrial use here.”

He said “future surprises” can be costly.

Levin said he was concerned a non-disclosure agreement between the city and Kilmer could result in the city underwriting unexpected extra costs because it’s barred from contacting independent experts.

And all but a tiny corner of the site is controlled by flood-related regulations, he said.

“What floodproofing will have to be done on that site?,” he asked, adding that determining that will take time and money.

Coun. Joni Baechler said she, too, is concerned about the property, sitting as it does in the floodway of the river.

She said an environmental assessment is key in understanding what surprises, if any, may lurk below the surface.